Review: Lost Atoms (Touring)

Tuesday 7th October 2025 at York Theatre Royal

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Lost Atoms is the latest offering from Frantic Assembly, and it’s a pretty emotionally charged piece documenting the blossoming and decay of a passionate love. As an intensive two hander, it impresses both with memorable performances and striking, highly physical staging.

Anna Jordan’s play sees Jess and Robbie meet, fall in love, navigate the tensions, break up and come together to recollect. They reflect on the journey and gently bicker over the details and inaccuracies of their recollections, all the while reminding us of the complexities faced by two people willing a connection to work and finding it slipping away. 

Not only is Jordan’s story an engaging – if brutal – look at love and loss, but the production is visually rich too. Fans of Frantic Assembly will be pleased to know that director Scott Graham adopts characteristic physical flair with this piece, opting to have the entire exchange play out in an abstract space and leaning heavily on meaningful physicality to map the emotional journey of our characters. 

Andrej Goulding’s set sees Robbie and Jess working through their relationship retrospective against a backdrop of an imposing wall of filing cabinet drawers which they effortlessly clamber across. It’s a perfect choice as they essentially rifle through the various files they’ve each mentally stored, documenting the highs and lows of their love in perfect sync or tricky contradiction, as memory and emotion play their part in complicating matters. 

Joe Layton and Hannah Sinclair Robinson are wonderful leads. Layton’s Robbie is all old wounds, vulnerability and hope while Robinson’s Jess is full of rebellious fire and quick wit. They’re a great pairing, providing convincing connection in early flirtations and succeeding in pulling at our heartstrings as they spiral towards an inevitable end. Their navigation of the physical elements of performance is equally impressive, with their physical contortions smoothly echoing the emotional ones experienced by characters.

All in all it’s a relentlessly emotional ride, with pockets of humour gently warming segue scenes before we move through the next fractious sequence befalling the parted couple. There’s plenty of food for thought in Jordan’s writing, and the humour lands well, even if it feels a little sparsely sprinkled on the whole. One to catch if you like visually rich takes on stories about what it is to be human, to risk and leap and fail and still come up for air enough to move forward. 

Lost Atoms is at York Theatre Royal until October 11th 2025 – more information and tickets can be found here.